The cockpit of a modern jet airliner is the control and information hub of the entire aircraft. Many new features -- of both the safety and comfort variety -- have been put into place in recent years. Virtually all cockpits are located at the front of the aircraft, primarily for visibility purposes.

The events of September 11, 2001 had an extremely pronounced impact on many things, airline cockpit design and safety implementations were greatly effected as well. The cockpits in most airlines have now been fortified in such manner that breaking into them using traditional means would be impossible.

While an airline's cockpit may look like an endless sea of gauges and switches to most, to a pilot every single knob and switch serves an extremely valuable purpose in properly piloting an airliner. Many of the modern instruments in an airliner cockpit have been calibrated in finely tuned ways, more so than was possible even as little as 20 years ago.

In an effort to reduce the dependency of the flight crew on one set of controls and flight information, there is often a second set of controls in a lesser used space of the cockpit. This redundancy is in place in case the first set fails.More info here: Cockpit Chronicles: A 'new' pilot's first trip on the line